HIIT OR LISS: Which Is Better For FAT LOSS? (What The Science Says)

[Music] okay welcome everyone to a new episode of myth busting their every Monday we're gonna take a look at some popular fitness or nutrition idea look at where that idea got started and then figure out whether it's true or false based on the most recent scientific evidence so this week we're gonna be looking at the idea that HIIT or high-intensity interval training is better for fat loss than low intensity steady-state cardio or lists so HIIT is when you do short but very high effort sprints and they don't actually have to be Sprint's as in actually running but just a high-intensity bout with whatever form of cardio you're doing and those high-intensity bursts are interspersed with lower intensity steady-state work in between intervals so an example of a HIIT session be something like let's say you're on the bike you do a five-minute warm-up and 20 seconds all out and then go at a light pace for two minutes and then repeat that again for say five or six intervals and on the other hand the low intensity steady-state or list would be like just walking on the treadmill and had a constant incline just at a steady pace the whole way through without any bursts of max exertion and while for a long time it was held that low intensity steady state was in fact the better option for fat loss mostly because it tends to use more fat as fuel during the cardio session itself which is true high-intensity exercise tends to utilize more carbohydrate for fuel and fat for fuel but like we discussed in the fasted cardio video on what really matters isn't what substrate you're burning during the cardio session itself but what happens to phat balance over a 24-hour period and so popular opinion has recently shifted away from the sort of steady-state cardio camp and to interval training being better for fat loss under the assumption that well you may not burn as much fat during the cardio session itself you will burn more fat after the session has ended and this is a popular concept it's known as the calorie after burn effect are more precisely the epoch or post-exercise oxygen consumption effect so basically if you utilize a high intensity during your cardio session you'll earn more fat in hours following the training session due to increased oxygen consumption so when you're back just laying on the couch after your cardio session is over your body continues to ramp up fat burning while you're just sitting there basically whereas with steady-state cardio you really only get the caloric burn that you get from the session itself and so you totally just miss out on that sort of post exercise epoch component and while this after burn effect definitely is real and it definitely is supported by many lines of scientific evidence I think it's practical relevance is somewhat overblown in a research review of a 2006 study on epoch Lyle McDonald highlights research showing that when subjects performed high-intensity cardio for 80 minutes The Epoch effect lasted for seven hours after training however it only amounted to about eighty extra calories burned which draws into question which is going to contribute more to fat loss the 700 or 800 calories burned during the exercise bout itself or the 80 calories burned afterwards and of course eighty minutes is a lot of cardio I think most people are doing at most probably half that so according to this research you probably be looking at something in the ballpark of about 40 extra calories burned because of the epoch effect and more recent literature has underplayed this even more 1 2017 systematic review and meta-analysis looking at 28 studies concluded that overall it appears that epoch is unlikely to account for any apparent greater fat loss potential with HIIT so in my opinion I think the real bonus to HIIT is that it does tend to be more time efficient than steady-state cardio and 2017 me Gian colleagues found that across 13 studies there were no significant differences between HIIT and moderate intensity continuous training for any body composition measure but HIIT required approximately 40% less training time commitment um so I think on the face of it this really does look like a home run for HIIT you get the same fat loss with nearly half the time investment um I would point out however that this analysis was looking at obese and overweight subjects without dietary control so I would argue that a potential reason why high-intensity interval training appears to be so much more time efficient and could be due to first of all its impact on reducing appetite I mean the subjects in the HIIT group could have just been consuming less calories and the fact that people tend to feel like they're working harder when doing interval training which may lead them to just push themselves harder in other areas of their exercise routine and I'm sort of just believe in the process more or believe in their efforts more and so while these points would technically count as bonuses or as points for HIIT under more uncontrolled say ad libitum conditions I think that if these extraneous factors were controlled for especially in healthy non obese subjects you'd see that difference in time efficiency start to go away and when you actually do out the math doing 30 minutes of interval training as we've described the intervals here and 30 minutes of steady-state cardio they should both burn roughly the same number of calories and as Lyle McDonald pointed out in his literature review the interval workout is alternating between very high caloric expenditures and very low expenditures such that the average expenditure still ends up coming out about the same and again since the influence of epoch is likely to be very small even if you do factor EPOC in here I think that in reality you're looking at more similar caloric burns between these two modalities for the same time investment and a lot of people probably realize but for all that I still think that people do tend to push themselves harder with HIIT in the real world and it does tend to be a little bit more time efficient and just not probably as exaggeratedly so as a lot of people seem to believe so in addition to this sort of time efficiency edge which again depends on just how low your low intensity cardio is I think that high-intensity interval training also just tends to be less boring which I think can make it much easier to adhere to in the real world however I think a potential strike against HIIT is that it does tend to be more difficult to recover from especially if you're combining it with weight training as many of us do and we need to remember that we're not only trying to lose fat but also trying to retain as much muscle as possible in the process and as dr. Eric Helms put it in a March 2013 issue of Allen arrogance research review HIIT is by definition high-intensity which it provides a high level of stress and that stress has to be recovered from I'm so in addition to generally just being more taxing interval training may also be somewhat redundant if you're doing regular weight training because if you think about it weight training does tend to resemble high-intensity interval training in a lot of ways so if you just imagine going in for a normal weight training session and you probably do an all-out very high-intensity bout with weights for say 20 or 30 seconds then you'd rest for two or three minutes between your sets and then just repeat that for the duration of your workout so it could be argued that if your just weight training at a sufficient intensity and you could be getting all or at least most of the positive adaptations seen with HIIT just from your resistance training alone so to conclude I'd like to point out that perhaps this HIIT versus Liss question isn't even the right question to be asking and again I'm going to borrow from dr. Eric Helms's Sentiments here where he said cardio should not be the primary vehicle for fat loss regardless of whether you're performing hit or lists truly the vast majority of fat loss should come from diet so in terms of practical application there are a few benefits to HIIT first it's more time efficient though probably not pay as much as you think it may blunt appetite a bit better it may actually get you working a bit harder and it tends to be less boring which may improve adherence but then there are also drawbacks tends to be harder to recover from and you can't do them nearly as often as list sessions if you need to and they may also hurt your weight training strength and performance may put you at an increased risk of injury and it could be redundant if you're already regularly weight training I'm so practically speaking I think the best recommendation is just to pick a method of cardio that works best for you personally when in a fat loss phase I like to use a combination of hit and list but I'll rarely let my hit sessions exceed one to two per week and when I do do them I try to make sure that they're done on a piece of equipment that tends to be less impact so something like the bike or the elliptical machine rather than doing actual Sprint's on say the treadmill are somewhere else now but ultimately I think that this really comes down to individual differences and preference and assume you're recovering adequately from your weight training routine I would say to pick whatever cardio modality is gonna allow you to fit it best in your schedule allow you to adhere to it best and to allow you to basically fit it in to your weight training routine in a way that sort of minimizes their interference so all things considered I would say that the idea that HIIT is better for fat loss is kind of busted based on the literature we have HIIT may have a slight edge just based on time efficiency although I wouldn't say this is quite as much of an advantage as it's often made out to be and again they do come at a recovery cost and just as one final takeaway here if you do decide to do HIIT try to limit those sessions to at most one to two times per week and if you are going to do them try to space them out as much as possible from your leg days so if you're doing legs one day try not to do interval training the next day try to have at least one day of recovery between those and I try to fill in the rest of your caloric deficit through reductions in food intake and through doing list sessions as needed to fill in that caloric deficit that you need to keep losing fat okay so guys that's gonna wrap this one up I hope that you really liked it if you guys are ever looking for ways to sort of support me and the content that I'm making over here I have a bunch of ways that you can do that linked in the description box below basically it comes down to using the things that my sponsors have to offer one thing in particular that I think you guys will really benefit from is the mass research review that's something that I'm reading every single month and I'll pull from it for almost all of these videos I find it to be really helpful in terms of just condensing all the science that's out there down to what you really need to know in terms of practical application I'm so if you haven't ever checked that out it is linked down there in the description I'd recommend at least giving it a read through and see if it's something you think you might be interested in once again guys I just want to say thank you for watching if you liked the video don't forget to leave me a thumbs up now don't forget to subscribe if you happen to be new and I will see you guys all here next Monday

Channel: Jeff Nippard

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Keywords: vlog, vlogger, iifym, science, bodybuilding, legs, arms, chest, back, fit couple, build muscle, jeff nippard, christian guzman, summer shredding, lean, ripped, abs, diet, lose weight, fat, fitness, flex, biceps, shredded, gymshark, alphalete, physique, motivation, natural bodybuilding, canadian, hiit workout, hiit workout for fat loss, hiit cardio, high intensity interval training, LISS

Id: Ir83IWRVTOw

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 19 2018